The incumbent government has no exit plan. The fixed tenure of a government in office otherwise comes with a clear mandate: you have five years to deliver your promises, for which you have been voted into power. Here, however, power comes with its own mechanics, while the size of the mandate has been repeatedly used to cane the opposition into submission.
Since it was such a large mandate, relatively speaking, we are led to believe that it comes with an automatic surplus, that they have a moral entitlement, if not an obligation, to exceed that otherwise fixed tenure. Refer to all the 2022 promises – a natural entitlement of those with a surplus mandate to set their own deadlines. Satta hi vichar hai [power is the only ideology], Punya Prasoon Bajpai summed it up in a most poetic commentary on the nature of this new BJP and the government it runs.
But if the government has no exit plan, if it does not wish to abide by the basic principles of democratic procedure, including but not only the model code of conduct, how do we help it towards the exit? Leaders want to continue in the seat of power, there is nothing unnatural about this. But perhaps even more than being voted into power, they would value being voted back into power – for such a mandate would be a vote for the achievements of the last tenure. Unlike what we tend to believe, in an ideal democracy, governments would be voted back into power more often. To vote relentlessly against the incumbent does not necessarily offer any guarantees to the people. And yet, as the last resort, we do need to be able to show the door to an incompetent set of power mongers.
Elections as platform economy
In the wake of the incumbent government, we need to think of the government industry, where the wider infrastructure of the ruling political party has laid a siege upon the state – not for the first time – but also upon thought itself. The party has displaced institutions and captured the public foreground via an industrial-ideological blend of power, speaking on behalf of the state while keeping public institutions subservient, if not hostage.
The party in this new blend is an employer, an advertiser, a mobiliser of both the state as well as non-state machinery towards whatever goals it has set itself. Ideology becomes only one of its many attributes, only one of the many planks upon which it makes so much noise that all other sounds are drowned out, never having to take responsibility for crowdfunded disruption, verbal attacks or direct assaults, whether in the real or virtual world.
The trouble with this government industry is that it cannot possibly conceive of an exit plan. This needs to be seen in relation to the size and character of capital that propels our election industry. One only has to register that elections are also a kind of platform economy, in which the users and providers are both trapped in an inter-evaluative dynamic while all the key decisions are taken by the algorithmic control. The app is merely the graphic interface of choices, like the EVM options. What appears on advertising windows is also the graphic ‘front’ of far more sinister algorithms at work in the background, which the user has no handles on to.
The persistent triumphs of platform economy promise endless growth under the assumption that there is enough surplus capital in the market to fuel it, without any proportionate promise of profitability. Let us think of the Uber IPO unveiled recently, which comes with the ‘warning’ that the company may never make a profit. It is a bit like the BJP manifesto and its shameless reiteration of the Ayodhya temple, which of course comes with an identical but implicit warning.
What does Uber promise via an IPO, if not at least the horizon of profitability? Growth, endless growth. What does the BJP manifesto promise if not the delivery of actual, substantive ‘deliverables’? Growth, without an exit from the seat of power. Satta hi vichar hai. The party cannot exit the industry it unleashes upon the nation.
What we have witnessed in the new BJP is not just a new totalitarian style of leadership, but more importantly, a new state-capital constellation in which the size of the state shrinks to the PMO, which engages with a very thin slice of capital ownership – whether domestic or international. Growth is therefore a constant murmur between surplus capital and state power. All that capital wants from the government industry is to spend. So we have virtually all the screens taken over with NaMo advertorials – at airports and metro stations, on our TV or mobile phone screens, and of course, via propaganda films screened at a neighbourhood theatre.
Monopolistic rhetoric
Growth with a monopolistic horizon is the horizon of late capitalism in our times. The new BJP shares that horizon with all its key allies in the corporate world – Ambani, Adani, Google or Facebook – as it does with its majoritarian voter base. It is time we considered how the incumbent state colludes with and depends on this new character of capital, public discourse and popular culture.
Such a monopolistic rhetoric has laid siege to the Indian state precisely because the new BJP, as a party which effectively runs the government industry, provides the perfect conduit for large capital to control and consolidate every inch of available territory. Needless to add, demonetisation was a key event in the history of the emergence of such an assertive public control by capital, but even more so, in the assertion of the party over the state and its public institutions.
Back in the day, the political party in power and its respective ideology could progress in cycles. It could be voted out, enjoy the cooling off period and return with a vengeance. The Congress was evidently prepared for such a cooling off period for a fixed tenure to its opposition. However, in the new cocktail of the government industry, the party has come to the foreground – evidently, in the figure of Amit Shah who looms large over cabinet ministers – at the expense of public institutions of all variety. It employs thousands in the IT cell directly, and many others indirectly, through a dubious network of foundations, private tech companies and NGOs, all of which actively participate in advertising the product, most often at the cost of facts.
Leaders who grow at the expense of nation, and party
The media – print, television, and a whole gamut of social networks – constitute the kernel of BJP’s mythmaking about itself. They help spread utterly poisonous falsehoods, but mainly endorse the idea that if there are narratives against us, there are plenty in our favour too. At no point of time, to a hypothetical neutral (upper-caste) observer, would the BJP appear wanting on account of rhetoric. Such a tireless spewing of venomous misinformation supports the party at every forum imaginable, upholding its aggressive onslaught.
If this relentless campaign was for the elections, a defeat could indeed put it to rest. But that does not seem to be the case. The elections are a mere landmark in an onward march which cannot possibly stop. Even if the party loses hold of the state, it would continue to remain a formidable industrial as well as ideological unit. However, the crucial bottleneck may be this: in the process of consolidating the government industry, which runs on extreme secrecy and releasing vital information to ‘key assets’, the party has also been reduced to the top duo. The monopolistic ambition of the party therefore comes up against the monopolistic power of its key individuals, who must grow endlessly not only at the expense of the state and the nation, but also the party itself. In a similar vein as above, then, the party itself becomes a platform for an inter-evaluative dynamic to emerge across its supporters and ‘drivers’ who may be said to co-own an asset they have no control over.
As we are manoeuvred on the illustrated map of the electoral as well as ideological grid, we may confuse the map with the territory. The layers upon layers of platform economy at work in the electoral and ideological arithmetic aspire to control and address us via our social metadata – demographic, psychographic and event-induced empirics. However, the more data it mines on us, the less knowledge it recovers since, unlike the geospatial data on our actual co-ordinates, the speculative rhetoric management is far more trial-and-error. If power is the only ideology, and its over-investment in a singular icon its signature of clarity and control, then the iconic image cannot possibly afford many errors.
The Gujarati angel from outside history. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Incarnation rhetoric
In a short essay I wrote before the 2014 elections, I had argued that Modi’s brand positioning was that of an intervention from outside history – an intervention achieved primarily on account of liveness: direct, apparently immediate, access to the sovereign icon across all possible media forms. I had argued:
In order for him to act upon history, he must stand entirely outside it. In this way, he cannot be accessed from within historical time… As sovereignty is surrendered to the one from outside history, not gradually but all at once, it allows the possibility of radical historical recovery, as the newly incumbent does not come from within the shared history. His enthronement promises an altogether new configuration. Modi not only offered a historical narrative of unending Congress rule, infested with corruption, appeasement and misrule, but also that of him observing from outside the fence. His story of his own rise goes from being a tea-seller to the chief minister of Gujarat, from a not-yet to a fully-sovereign. He is never a deputy, never a peg within the system; he suffers till his agency is still being shaped, and returns as already the incumbent.
The trouble with incarnation rhetoric, however, is that it cannot be sold twice. Once descended in human form, the incarnate must risk his troubling proximity with human frailties. The mask, on that front, has badly slipped. The repeated mention of ‘seventy years of Congress rule’ is now a tired attempt to reinvent an uninterrupted historical continuity – one single catastrophe – when the time has come for him to account for his own achievements. Whether or not he had wings which he gave up to stand by us, there is no gaining those wings back to rise up towards the heavens. I am starkly reminded of Water Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Can the Gujarati angel from outside history close his wings? Or has he unleashed a storm too strong for his own good?
Akshaya Kumar teaches at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Indore
